Improving consumer sentiment for smart meters

Smart meters, once believed to be readily acceptable to
regulators, utilities, and consumers, are no longer the same due to growing
skepticism about smart meters for health, privacy, and security issues. Every
utility is now facing the challenge on how to ensure smooth transition from a
legacy to a smarter utility. While utilities know the importance of moving
towards smarter utilities, reluctance by consumers is causing the regulators to
choose the middle path, often by, either delaying the smart meter rollout or
introducing newer policies (opt out rule), which is aggravating the situation
even more. Research organizations have identified consumer backlash for smart
meters as one of top trends in utility industry in the coming years.

Consumer Queries

Some of the
issues consumers have reported so far include

Health
hazard from smart meter radiation

Privacy
issues due to granular data in smart meter

Security
issues by unauthorized access to smart meter

Higher bills
resulting from smart meter installation

Consumers
have to pay additional money in order keep a legacy meter in place of smart
meter - opt out rule. They are already paying for smart meters using the rates
cases anyways.

and others.

Resolution to Consumer Queries

Each of
these problems can be resolved or explained, like

Certification of smart meter radiation under permissible range or by use of
PLC technologies

Utilities
always have statistical energy usage information of their consumers and other
confidential information. Protecting this data through adequate security
measure is important here.

Improved
security features within smart meters with high degree encryption and key
based communication.

Replace an
old legacy meter with a new legacy meter or smart meter. Both the new legacy
meter and smart meter should provide same usage and thereby bills. This may be
higher than the previous bills as the old legacy meter tend to run slow in
favor of consumers due to wear and tear over the years.

Implementing
newer ways of meter reading like instructing consumers to send their reading
through an IVR/online/mail-in solution once a month. Off course, periodic
checks and balances need to be in place to make it full proof. This can at
least reduce the cost of utility meter reading for legacy meters and thereby
cost recovery for opt out rule.

Consumer Awareness through ‘Smart Meter Consumer
Analytics'

But,
explaining these problems is a reactive approach rather than a proactive
approach to consumer engagement. Consumer engagement needs to start well before
one sees a smart meter in their home. This can be done leveraging analytics
commonly related to consumers or what they will be interested in. Some of these
"Smart Meter Consumer Analytics" can be

How much
dollar can you (consumer) save by participating in a demand response event
(ex. Peak Time Rebate)?

What will
my bill look like at the end of the month?

How soon
can we (utilities) know about a ‘bad' meter and replace it even before you
notice its impact in your bill?

How soon
can we get you connected when you move in a new apartment?

What is
your usage during on-peak and off-peak hours over the day/week/month/year with
appliance level information?

What is
the correlation between your usage and weather data through-out the
day/week/month/year?

How much
carbon emission we have reduced by calling a peak time rebate event with
% participation and what we could achieve by 100% participation?

How much
outage hours was reduced using automated notification from smart meters?

and there
can be many more.

Most of these consumer oriented questions can be
categorized as follows.

All of these information need be passed on to the
consumers, and should be arrived from real case studies with specific data
obtained from the smart meter implementation by different utilities. These
information need to be accompanied by a comparative analogy with that of legacy
meter.

A planned approach towards consumer engagement starts from
within the utilities. Adequate change management to fully understand the smart
metering and related changes is the first step. Thereafter it need to start
consumer engagement using widely reached tools like bill inserts, mass
marketing, kiosk, bill boards, etc. A phased communication approach aligned with
the smart metering rollout is also necessary to provide meaningful communication
to everyone. Smart Metering Rollout usually happens in these phases, i.e. Smart
Meter Pilot Smart -> Meter Roll Out -> Billing through Smart Meter -> Smart
Meter Programs. Using Smart Meter Consumer Analyticsin these
communications will definitely be helpful in boosting consumer sentiments. Call
centers/portals need to be equipped with these analytics to answer any consumer
queries related to these analytics. Smart Meter Consumer Analytics is an
advantage that should be leveraged by a utility that has started venturing into
the smart metering area.

A consolidated view of the approach is provided below.

Conclusion

The problem described here is a very common risk of
conservatism towards adoption of newer technologies. I still remember how
reluctant I was to use internet banking at the beginning. But the drivers of
smart metering are urgent and important and much more serious than internet
banking. Depleting non-renewable energy resources, increasing demand,
uncertainty in renewable integration, lack of adequate power storage is
providing enough fuel for the utilities to implement this smart meter
infrastructure. So it requires support from all the stakeholders, which can be
achieved through a planned knowledge management.

Comments

Tue, 05/21/2013 - 5:34am

Huge assumptions here. Education is not the problem, benefits are the problem.

Consumers never wanted variable rates and never wanted to make their use of electricity more complicated or costly. It was assumed that tech-savvy consumers would embrace the smart meter and find fabulous new ways to enhance their use of energy. No one had any concrete ideas about how to do anything other than use less energy or shift energy use to off-peak hours.

Less energy is not a benefit to consumers. Shifting use to off-peak hours is not a benefit to consumers - it is a CHORE. Higher rates to pay for using less at less convenient times is not a benefit to consumers.

In this context, since the consumer-killer-app of smart meters has not materialized, and the costs and complexity of deployments has hit home, regulators and utilities are having their own reality-check about the benefits of more projects.

Wed, 05/22/2013 - 7:47am

Firstly, what's in it for the customer..?
1) Monopoly utilities have a rate increment for the metering,reading, bill computation, printing, mailing, etc. Ask the PSC to allow ME, the customer, to read my meter with a smart phone pic (dated) or an app to transmit my usage to the billing dept. Email me the billing (or direct me to a website) and let ME take the avoided costs as a discount on my service. (Ok, I'll settle for 90% of avoided costs..)
2) ANYTHING else, and I let the paper bills and readers on foot bleed costs for the next century. (..and I worked 35 yrs for utilities and own a LOT of IOU stock.)

Tue, 05/28/2013 - 12:34am

M. Gordon-Byrne makes a good point, saying about present smart meter implementations " No one had any concrete ideas about how to do anything". Indeed, without providing customers timely data on their current consumption and coincident market conditions, what was expected that customers would do? Given the crudeness of the market design in use (continuous TOU with no reference to actual necessity) it is not surprising that the incentives offered occur far too frequently and are nowhere near large enough to have any meaningful result.

Mon, 06/03/2013 - 11:00am

For everyone considering further supporting payments to customers who implement demand control using a TOU metering strategy, you should note that, of all the money spent reducing rates at night, or collected increasing rates during the day, pretty much all of it (the part paying peaking generator companies capital costs rather than fuel and O&M) is wasted unless it causes a reduction of peak below the maximum peak over the next ten years. Calculate or estimate the maximum 1 hour grid peak during the next ten years, make payments or penalties during times to keep the peak a fixed target amount below that, and ignore ALL other times.

Mon, 06/03/2013 - 4:26pm

Smart meters are nothing more than a "Trojan Horse" for unloading risk onto the customer (i.e. time-of-use rates). There is no value in the meters for the consumer which is the reason for the fierce opposition. Anybody that believes otherwise is not very observant or simply part of the Utility business and clearly not an advocate for the customer.

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